Sauce

Singer-songwriter Ben Lee is doing pretty well for a guy who sees his career as a series of beneficial mistakes. In the middle of a heatwave, he spoke to me about what it took for his latest album to get Ripe.

I guess with all the hot weather, the fruit on the trees over there would be becoming Ripe?
What a segue! Unbelievable! I plant myself at your feet! [Laughs]

I just felt the cheese leaking out of me as I said it …
Why not, man? Milk it!

Is it the content on the album? Or is it a statement of your career, or yourself? What is it about any of those things that compelled you to call the album Ripe?
It’s probably a bit of all of that, but to me … what’s exciting about something being “ripe” isn’t just the moment of consummating – like eating the fruit or whatever. It’s all the patience that you’ve had to develop to let it get there. [Laughs] And I think … I’m not a patient person by nature – I’ve rushed a lot of things in my life, and sometimes I jump in, you know? But I’ve had to be “ripe” … a lot of what makes you patient is failing. I mean, you don’t get everything you want, so you just have to keep doing it again and again until you get it right. And I feel like part of what I’m proud of with my career is nothing I can even take credit for – it’s just that I’ve sort of stuck it out and ripened over the years, you know what I mean? Just by making more and more records, and writing more and more songs and touring, you develop a tenacity, and a kind of confidence or something.

There’s an American saying, I believe – You fail your way to success.
Exactly.

I was wondering – what was the last thing that you felt you failed at, that has helped you develop a successful career?
Oh, God … I mean, they’re infinites. I really do look at my personal, emotional, artistic, spiritual, psychological development in all those areas as being a series of failures. I mean … it’s so interesting to try and put your finger on one …

You’re going to have to open up a bit here, I guess …
Yeah, making coffee this morning for my girlfriend, and just kind of not being good at it. I mean, I’ve never had a girlfriend that likes coffee before, and I don’t really like it. So I’m putting myself out there, and I’m trying to get good at something. And I don’t know when it’s good and when it’s not good, so the only way is to take it out there, you know what I mean? And get that reaction. And it’s literally a case where you’ll have to make a hundred bad cups before you make a good cup.

I guess you’ve answered my other question, which was going to be “are you over in L.A. tuning movie stars”? But I guess not.
“Tuning”? [Laughs] I like that! No, no – I’m pretty monogamous at the moment. I’ve gone through my phases … I mean, I shouldn’t say I’m “pretty” … I’m totally monogamous! That can get you in trouble if you say things like that! No, I’m totally monogamous. Have you ever read The Birthday Book, with all the birthdays? My one’s actually really accurate for me – it says you’re capable of being either a complete slut or totally loyal and monogamous and committed. And I am like that, you know? I can go uptown, I can go downtown!

Do you read the stars? Are you a newspaper stars reader?
If I come across it, you know? I don’t let myself get too caught up in it …

What sign are you?
I’m Virgo – my birthday’s next week.

What date?
September 11th … Me and Moby – we have the same birthday … But I’ve found that there are bigger questions worth contemplating than “am I going to get what I want?” Do you know what I mean? In some ways, knowledge of all those things – like tarot cards and horoscopes – they’re kind of based on “are you going to get what you want?” And I’m sort of interested in my journey as a process of, like, surrendering to what the world wants of me. I try not to obsess about “am I going to get what I want”, because I don’t even know what I want. I sort of do … I want to be a huge rock star, and I’ve always wanted that, and I’ve always wanted it to be with a twist, you know? I’ve always wanted to work at the top level of pop music, and still inject it with a sense of humour and a soulfulness and a realness, that I don’t perceive as being too “present” in a lot of it. But, as far as my specific goals, and how I’m going to get there, I don’t really know. It’s just a series of failings of things, and you sort of end up with a career.

Where did you come from, Ben? Where were you born? What was your childhood like? Where did you grow up?
Sydney – I was born in Sydney … You know – Jewish family … a lot of music in the family, but it wasn’t at all forced on me. I sort of “found my way” to it. My family where all kind of academic, this generation. I was one of the only ones that didn’t go to university.

Wow, that must have freaked them out.
Oh, yeah! I mean, can you imagine? It’s like, a brutalising thing to have to deliver.

It’s like being a meat-eater in a family of vegetarians.
[Laughs] Exactly. But I sort of knew, from a young age, that everything I was learning was happening “experientially”. Like, none of my big lessons came in school. I wanted to taste things, you know? I wanted to actually engage with them in a real way.

And what would you say have been the milestones in your career so far? Have there been turning points?
Yeah, major turning points. But they often weren’t to do with my career – they were to do with things happening in my life that made me look at my career differently, you know? I mean, a major one recently was Awake being so successful after I had it rejected by labels, and paid for it myself and all that sort of thing. Because that’s a real confidence-builder, in terms of following your own sense of musicality and artistry, because you just say, “Oh, if I do what I want, there’s an audience for it.” So there’s that. I think being fourteen and getting plucked out of my bedroom and being given a stage and a record label – that was a major turning point for me. I think another one was Something To Remember Me By, which was the first record of mine that really flopped. That was a major turning point for me, because I was so earnest, and I was just doing my best. I mean, I know it wasn’t the record that people had liked before … but I really was just putting my best foot forward, and I was shocked that people would turn against it, you know? So that was a really big thing – having my first hit, and the blessing and curse of that, of Cigarettes Will Kill You, and dealing with the pressure of fame for the first time was really big … being involved in my first major relationship with Claire [Danes] – that was a six year, real growth period. I know – I’m going on and on. And then the major one … really the biggest thing in my life, I think – the single biggest major milestone in my life was meeting my spiritual teacher, which was the first time I started looking at music as my kind of service, and my prayer. I was always interested in spirituality, and I always thought that my music was like my work, and then I went and I would meditate or whatever in private. I thought the two sort of stayed separate. And then, when I met this teacher, he was very clear with me that my path was to try and inject my music with this sense of hope for my audience and stuff. So that was a real culmination with a lot of events, and a lot of different outlooks that I’d been experimenting throughout the course of making records and writing songs.

I see you as definitely being able to be called a “wordsmith” … but then, you have this other element, which is the musical side of it; the melody side of it. I was just wondering – how do you compare the feeling of writing a great lyric or a great phrase, compared with writing a great, or satisfying melody?
Well I don’t like poetry … yet. I’ve never written a great poem. I’ve mucked around with it – I’ve never done it. I don’t think my songs particularly work as poems. I think there is a poetry to pop music, and to rock ‘n’ roll songs, that has its own beauty to it. But it can’t be divorced from the rhythm or the melody. I mean, all my best lyrics … they’re meant to be sung, you know?

Ben Lee’s latest album is Ripe for the picking now.

Ben talks about his childhood, and his decision to go into music,
Listen to an MP3 of the full interview Below